His weapons and his stuff, or "I don't know from radar or sonar"

Lou Reed on tai chi and related matters, a rather charming link via Neil Gaiman's blog.

It was funny, I was sitting in Cafe Pamplona on Saturday morning and reading the latest issue of Bookforum (about which more anon, but that is a truly great wad of pages, I cannot recommend it highly enough, it totally countered my reunion malaise!) and there was a very nice and enthusiastic waitress (in my day it was all surly but rather beautiful men of more or less saturnine description) and if I closed my eyes and listened to her talking to her co-worker I could have been listening to myself equally rhapsodically enthusing circa 1988, the names were so exactly the same: Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground, Joyce Carol Oates...

(My dear friend A. and I used to sit in that cafe for hours at a time, eking out whatever meager sum we had to spend! These occasions featured the ritual sharing of either a mint parfait or a fruit tart which we invariably had to select with great thought from the pastry tray even though we always got the same kind...)

Another highlight of the weekend: three loops round the Fresh Pond reservoir first thing Saturday morning. Got quite a bit of light reading done here and there along the way (not, I mean, while running), but will wait till tomorrow to chronicle it. Sad times thinking about lost friends. Sleep deficit also now running pretty intolerably high, unfortunately; will see what can be done about this over the next few days, but I am not hopeful!